Meridian Care of Alice

We also wanted to point out that this facility has received near flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A+ in this area. Inspection scores are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility performed well in our long-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our most elite grades. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After we finished assessing the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 99.55654 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. We weighed the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses were with patients, in calculating our score in this category. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. It scored well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care provided.

This nursing home's least impressive area is short-term care, which is the final area we analyzed. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this area. In spite of a few favorable grades in other categories, this score is still a bit of a concern so we would like to to make a note of it. In the category of short-term care, we strive to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. In this place's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than a typical facility. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.2 percent of its patients returning home.